Currently belonging to multimillionaire sports fanatic Tom Hicks — former owner of the Dallas Stars, Texas Rangers and Liverpool FC — the property includes a mirrored Art Deco bar, gym, tennis court, rose and vegetable gardens as well as a floorwide home theater.

It’s a property that’s moved the agent handling the sale, Douglas Newby, to heights of prose rarely seen in real estate advertising. “I have watched men stand up straighter in the presence of such powerful architecture and women become softer, even lovelier, in the presence of perfect proportions and subtle refinement,” he writes in the property’s listing. “One can just imagine the number of influential people from around the world who have had a drink in this bar or how this expressive space fueled conga lines dancing through the home in the 1940s and 1950s.”

The house sits within the ultra-elite Mayflower Estates neighborhood, also home to former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, and was originally commissioned by Italian Count Pio Crespi. Hicks, formerly included in the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, spent up to $100 million in restoration costs when he bought the property 16 years ago.

And despite an estimated 700,000 home repossessions across the U.S. last year, the luxury market has fared somewhat better; plenty of plush residences sold in 2012 for substantial prices. That’s not to say there haven’t been casualties: construction of the world’s largest home, belonging to timeshare mogul David Siegel and his beauty queen wife Jackie, stalled because of the recession.